Sometimes, when I have those really brief moments when I miss home and contemplate moving to be closer to my parents, I am brought back to reality quite abruptly when my mother decides to pick a fight with me over something completely inane and caused by herself.
My dad informs me over the phone today that my mom has planned a dinner for us with her loser Jehovah’s Witness friend and her best friend and husband next Wednesday. I told my dad that I was never informed of this plan and had already made dinner plans with my friend and her husband. My mom snatches the phone from my dad and says that I cannot prioritize “outside people” before her and that I do not care about her and do not realize how depressed she is. Just because she seems okay does not mean she is. I simply said, I already made plans. I am not cancelling them. This is far from the first time this has happened.
I don’t know if she will ever realize that I am not going to cancel on everyone else in my life just to accommodate her no-reason schedule that she just assumes she gets to create and the rest of the world must revolve around. Ed didn’t want to deal with it anymore, so he left us. I don’t want to deal with it anymore, either.
My mom gets the same way and tries to guilt me into getting her way. I just argue back that when it comes down to it, I am my own person and me wanting to visit home means seeing people outside of the family. It also makes staying with parents a little uncomfortable because they suddenly like to impose the whole “you’re under my roof, so follow my rules” throwdown — that in its own is hilarious, especially since I haven’t been living at home since college 😡